With continuous development of communications technologies, operators are gradually replacing Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks with Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. When an operator deploys an LTE network, a small part of a GSM network spectrum is reserved for some areas with heavy traffic, and the other part of the GSM network spectrum is all allocated to the LTE for use. Generally, a buffer zone is set around a GSM base station, to avoid mutual interference between signals of a GSM system and an LTE system. For example, there is originally a 20 M GSM network spectrum, and currently, 3.6 M is reserved for a GSM cell, 5 M is allocated to the buffer zone, and the remaining 11.4 M is all allocated to an LTE cell for use. To further improve utilization of a network spectrum, the prior art provides the following manner for allocating the buffer zone to the LTE system for use.
In a process that user equipment (UE) accesses an LTE cell, if an LTE spectrum overlaps a GSM spectrum (that is, a buffer zone exists), a base station instructs the UE to detect whether the UE can accept interference from a GSM signal (which is also referred to as an inter-system measurement). If the UE can accept interference from the GSM signal, the base station allows the UE to use a spectrum of the buffer zone.
In a process of implementing the foregoing spectrum processing, it is found that the prior art has at least the following problem: In the prior art, the UE needs to have an inter-system measurement capability, that is, a capability of detecting whether the UE can accept the GSM signal. If the UE does not have the inter-system measurement capability, the spectrum of the buffer zone cannot be used. When the UE has the inter-system measurement capability, in an inter-system measurement process, not only power consumption of the UE is increased, but also sending of a measurement report (an inter-system measurement result) consumes scarce air interface resources of the LTE cell.